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“There’s no clinical name for Hinckley’s mimetic madness. Which is odd, because there’s an obvious literary precedent: you can find the same sickness in Don Quixote. Hinckley watched movies until he thought he was in one; Cervantes’s landowner is similarly mesmerized by printed text. Trapped in his lonely house somewhere in La Mancha, with only Palmerín of England and Amadís of Gaul for company, until his sanity ebbs away. Like all psychopathology, it’s an extreme version of a very ordinary aspect of the mind. We all have a social self; we all need recognition from other people. It’s not abnormal to want to be famous. It’s just that sometimes that need obliterates everything else. Don Quixote changes his name and declares himself a knight. He makes up a lady to fall psychotically in love with. He starts riding around on his old nag, declaring that every shabby roadside inn is really a castle, and the sheep being driven down the road are really an army. It’s not that he has confused the books for reality. It’s death drive. He wants to be a famous knight errant, like the ones in his books, because that means becoming an object, and not having to suffer through the subjective misery of a sad, lonely, loveless man nearing the end of his life.” 0 reply
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